He wheels the table over to the wall. ‘How am I supposed to have a clear head for work if you wake me up at quarter past five in the morning?’ he says.
I hear myself apologise to him. I need to know, need to be told. However bad it is.
‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘Shush. Stop crying, there’s no need to cry. Now, shuffle along and down-this way, that’s right-and put your legs up against the wall, so that your body makes a right angle. That’s good. Now, stay in that position. Get as comfortable as you can. I want you to stay like that for an hour or so.’
Tears pour down my cheeks, collect in my ears. I can’t speak.
He walks over to the window, tapping the gun against his open palm. ‘I suppose, since you’ve obviously worked it out, there’s no point in my being secretive any more. You saw the title of the recipe book.’
‘I’m not pregnant!’
‘You might be. You might be already, if we’re lucky.’
The vitamin pill: it was folic acid. That’s why the taste was so familiar. I took it throughout both my pregnancies.
‘Have you raped me? How many times?’
He makes a disgusted noise. ‘Thanks,’ he murmurs. ‘Thanks such a lot for that vote of confidence.’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘I’m not an animal. I used a syringe.’ He lets out a small laugh. ‘I didn’t have a turkey baster, not being much of a cook. You’re the only person I’ve ever cooked for, in fact.’
‘You drugged me and undressed me and injected me with… with…’
He picks up my hand and squeezes it. ‘Sally, I want us to be a proper family. I’ve got a right…’ His voice wavers. ‘Everybody has a right to have a proper happy family. I’ve never had that, Sally. I don’t think you have either.’
‘That’s not true, it’s not true!’
‘I know you need time to adjust. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting we sleep together, not yet. Never, if you really don’t want to. I’m not a brute.’
I dig my fingers into my legs. If I could, I’d rip out all my insides until there was nothing left of me.
‘I know I should have told you about the baby but… well, I was eager to get the ball rolling. I’m sorry.’
‘How many times have you… injected me?’ I manage to say.
‘Just twice. And I’ve got a good feeling about this last time.’ He crosses his fingers, holds them in front of my face.
I cry while he strokes and pats my hand and makes soothing noises. I have no idea how much time is passing, how much of my life I am losing in this room: half an hour, maybe longer, since he last spoke. When I run out of tears, I say, ‘Why did you give me a massage?’
‘To make you feel good. You love massages.’
‘I was unconscious!’
‘I thought it might relax you, subconsciously. Sometimes the body knows things the mind doesn’t. The more relaxed you are, the more likely you are to conceive.’
I feel a surge in my stomach, nearly choke on the bile that rises to fill my throat.
‘Do you think I want this to be horrible for you, Sally? I don’t. I truly don’t.’
‘I know.’ I’m going to get that gun off you and I’m going to kill you, you sick fuck.
‘You have to try to want what I want. Do you remember, at Seddon Hall, you told me you were sick of always being the one who had to arrange everything: Valentine’s Day dinners, even treats for your own birthday?’
‘You make it sound as if I hated my life!’ I blurt out, sobbing. I can’t bear to listen to him. ‘I love my life-I was just complaining!’
‘With good cause,’ he says, tapping the gun against the side of the massage table. ‘What about the Christmas when you chose and bought your own present from Nick because you didn’t trust him to get the right thing: Boudoir eau de parfum by Vivienne Westwood. You even wrapped it yourself and wrote “To Sally, love Nick” on it. Do you remember telling me that? Because you were sick of wondering if Nick would remember to wrap it in time for Christmas Day.’
Why did I tell him so much?
‘Can I… please could I have my phone, just for a few minutes? I need to speak to Zoe and Jake.’
I have said the wrong thing. He drops my hand. His eyes harden, his face as close to a portrait of pure evil as anything I’ve ever seen. ‘Zoe and Jake,’ he repeats in a wooden voice. ‘The trouble with you, Sally, is that you never know when the party’s over.’
Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723
Case Ref: VN87
OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra
GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 7 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)
17 May 2006, 5.10 a.m.
A brilliant thing happened tonight-I thought for a while that it might be the key to everything. Well, last night, I suppose you’d have to say, but I haven’t had any sleep. I’m going to end up like that man I saw on that ‘shock-doc’ documentary, who was so sleep-deprived for so long that he ended up with a permanent headache. When he went to the doctor, he was told that by not sleeping enough he’d done irreparable damage to the nerve endings in his brain. The doctor gave him a drug to stop the headache, but that made him shake as if he had Parkinson’s disease. The documentary said only that he was a contract lawyer in the city, not whether he had small children, but I’m certain he did. I think he had three children under five and a wife who also worked full-time.
I took Lucy to the theatre last night. Not to a matinee, not like the awful time we went to see Mungo’s Magic Show and we were surrounded by brats, and Lucy screamed because I wouldn’t let her eat two Cornettos. No, this time I took her in the evening, like an adult. I wondered if she might be more bearable if I treated her more like a grown-up. So I booked two tickets to Oklahoma ! the musical at Spilling Little Theatre. Mark was away at yet another conference. I told Lucy that she and I would be going out together for a special treat evening, but only if she was very good. She was so excited, happier than I’ve ever seen her, and she really did try hard. I told her we would go out for dinner first, and she was even more excited about that. She’d never been to a restaurant in the evening before, and she knew it was something grown-ups did, so of course she wanted to do it.
We went to Orlando ’s on Bowditch Street, and Lucy had spaghetti bolognese. For once she ate everything on her plate. Then we held hands and walked to the theatre, and she sat through the whole performance transfixed, as still as a statue, eyes as wide as plates. Afterwards she said, ‘That was great. Thank you for taking me to the theatre, Mummy.’ She said she loved me and I said I loved her and we held hands again all the way back to the car. I thought it was a turning point. I decided to do grown-up things with her whenever I could, try to treat her more like a twelve-year-old than a five-year-old.
I must have been stupid or desperate or both to think that would work. An hour ago, when I was tossing and turning in bed and wondering what Lucy and I might do together next-a manicure, the National Portrait Gallery, the cinema-I felt someone tugging on my hair. I thought it was an intruder and screamed, but it was Lucy. Normally when she wakes at night, she doesn’t get out of bed; she yells for me and expects me to come running. But there she was, and she wasn’t upset. She was smiling. ‘Mummy, can we go to the theatre again?’ she said.
‘Yes, darling,’ I promised. ‘Very soon. But you’ve got to go back to sleep, Lucy, it’s not morning yet.’
Could I have handled it better? No doubt my mother would say so. If Lucy had asked her, she would probably have leaped out of bed, even at four in the morning, and searched on the Internet for suitable shows, bleary-eyed but insisting she was full of energy. I’ve asked her, often, how she managed not to feel permanently exhausted when I was little. She puts on a smug little smile, waves her hand dismissively and says, ‘Being tired has never killed anyone. You don’t know how lucky you are!’ Then she tells me an anecdote about someone she met in town whose daughter has triplets, no husband and seventeen low-paid manual jobs that she must do simultaneously in order to feed her family. And I envy this down-trodden labourer that my mother has almost definitely invented for the sole purpose of shaming me, because it sounds as if her life has probably always been appalling. Whereas I had a brilliant life before I became a parent: that is why I find it so hard to cope.